2018 Talent Acquisition Trends You Need to Know

A human resource recruiters job will be full of innovation in the New Year. The Statistics Portal is projecting that 154 million employees in the United States will be employed in 2018. As organizations focus on ways to find younger and top-tier talent, work productivity in HR will increase as technology assists HR with time-consuming responsibilities.

The next time you are invited to a meeting to improve the way your department functions, bring a few of these ideas with you.

1.Telecommute Work Opportunities

In her Uptowork article, Natalie Severt writes about how work-from-home job opportunities help to engage and retain millennial workers. About 30 percent of the workforce works from home, and offering this flexibility as a recruitment tool attracts millennial and Generation Z candidates. In addition to the work-life balance this gives to employees, a company located in a rural area can hire a diverse workforce of professionals who live in competitive cities like Toronto, New York, San Francisco and Chicago. The ideal technology for video conferencing tools and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software will be an-all-in-one online platform that will enable people working around the world to connect with their team.

2. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence will become the virtual assistant for human resources professionals. It will take over administrative work that includes onboarding, categorizing candidates’ records, providing employees’ learning content and assessing employees’ work performance. A semantic analysis will allow you to study the behavior of employees so that you can refine work performance objectives for new hires and reflect those new objectives in new job descriptions posted online.

As AI provides a helping hand, recruiters will focus their energy on improving employee engagement and offering workplace programs that will improve your overall workplace culture.

3. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)

If you think a 360-degree virtual tour to explore a property on the market is out of this world, imagine if what it would be like to create virtual reality tours of your workplace for employees who plan to work abroad. You could set up an interactive job posting for potential candidates so that they could attend employee events and experience your company’s workplace culture.

Virtual Reality assessments are expected to simulate work challenges that lead to follow-up discussions with employees on how to resolve similar real-life situations on the job.

4. Employment Conversion Rates

On average, recruiters receive close to 250 résumés for a single job posting, which is a conversion rate of 0.4 percent. However, the recruiters with the highest productivity ratings reviewed the applications of only 91 candidates to find the right employee for the job, which is a 1 percent conversion rate. The difference in productivity between average and top recruiters is in the software the top recruiters used—software that matches the skills or experience of candidates with the job posted.

Final Thoughts

The work of human resources professionals will be optimized as software algorithms simplify their work. Precise technology will help recruiters identify the right candidate for the job, which will lower employee turnover and the cost of hiring and training new employees. With software that allows you to acquire the best talent faster, you can turn your focus to employee engagement and well-being, offering tailored benefit packages to retain top talent. This focus on motivating employees will be key to improving the overall workplace experience for everyone.

The word “Millennials” will start to be used less and less, and it will be replaced with “Generation Z.” Generation Z, the generation entering the workforce, started graduating from college last year. 2017 was the first year for Generation Z to be in the workplace, and, for the next decade, we will be hearing from “Generation Z experts.”

Kristin Kelley

VP of Marketing and Communications, Randstad Technologies

"As the fourth largest IT staffing company in the US, Sapphire (now Randstad Technologies) provides customized solutions for both public and private corporations. In 2007, Sapphire integrated eSkill with its website to administer tests to online applicants. This allows recruiters to quickly weed through candidates to find only the best [...]

Christa Foley

Recruiting Manager Zappos

“The wide variety and customizability of eSkill’s online testing allows us to pre-screen many of our candidates before they even get to our doors. And this is a key factor, because once a potential hire shows he/she possesses the skills necessary to do the job, our recruiters can concentrate on the second—and equally important—part of the [...]